I seldom reread. There is so much out there waiting that I have little inclination to carve out the time to read even the best books a second time. Sometimes, though, I find my soul in a story, and then I am compelled to return.

Wendell Berry is one who draws me back. The moral universe in which his characters live, the farming culture they inhabit speaks to me profoundly. Interestingly enough, the depth of my response comes not from my own history but from my mother’s. My mother grew up on a farm, and when I was a child I could practically warm my hands at the glow that came from her when she spoke of that farm. Everything in Berry’s world is familiar to me, passed down through my mother. It matters not at all that he writes about Kentucky and she grew up in Minnesota.  

That familiarity is, no doubt, why, some years ago, one of Wendell Berry’s novels could comfort me even as I sat by my son’s hospital bed when he was being diagnosed with a terminal illness. I found the novel during one of my and my daughter-in-law’s brief escapes from the hospital. I don’t remember which novel it was now, and it doesn’t matter, but I’ll never forget the comfort I found in that story even as the world shattered around our feet.

Another writer who calls to me as fiercely is Elizabeth Strout. The novel of hers that I find most compelling is Abide with Me. That story so perfectly resurrects for me the oddly vulnerable life of clergy and their spouses, a life I lived for a couple of decades, that reading it the first time cracked me wide open. It carried me back to much I’d lived and forgotten . . . suppressed? Abide with Me did what the best literature always does, reminded me that, even at our most lonely, we are not alone.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell astonished me with the depth of its insights and the complexity of its world. But what I’ll always carry with me is the scene, played out with soul-wrenching irony, when a disillusioned Jesuit priest finally arrives at the truth of his faith-seeking. If he had found the God he’d been searching for I would have been touched. That he found brutality and degradation instead left me filled with astonished compassion.

Each of these stories has come to be part of who I am.

But if I am asked what story touched my life most deeply, I would have to return to a nameless picture book. Nameless because I can’t remember the title, though I can still see the cover in my mind perfectly. It was pale blue with a fuzzy pink lamb on the cover, the kind of fuzz small hands love to stroke.

I never owned the book. But every time my mother and I visited the public library, I went straight to it . . . again and again and again. It was a classic story. The lamb gets lost and searches for his mother. Lear-like, he gets caught in a storm, and I can still see—even more clearly than I can see the cover—the double-page spread when all color suddenly left, when lightning flashed in the grays of the page, and when—how could it be?—even the lamb’s pettable pink fuzz vanished. I ran my fingers over the smooth, gray lamb again and again, willing the pink fuzz to return.

By the end of the story the lamb is reunited with his mother . . . of course. He is even pink and fuzzy again. What joy!

Where did my passionate connection to that lost lamb come from, I whose mother stood so close that losing her should have been beyond imagining? Out of a fear too deep to be named but not too deep to be healed through the lamb’s story . . . again and again and again.

All these books have one thing in common, Aristotle’s purging of pity and fear. Each one caught something unspoken, unacknowledged, perhaps only half remembered in my own life and allowed me to move through it . . . this time to safety. These particular stories might not do the same for you, which is why literature must be endlessly various. But I am more whole for my encounter with each one.

It’s what I hope my own stories might accomplish occasionally, the very most I can hope. That some few readers will find their own lives reproduced, their own needs acknowledged, their own world made more safe by discovering that they are not—never have been and never will be—alone.